Fans, Freedom, and Frustration

Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a "Bono Moment" in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2's lead singer. Check it out and come back here. Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation. he may be being a fan, but he hasn't lost his mind. The female is being...a groupie, I guess. Though the groupies I've met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it. In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things. The fan reaction---mindless adulation bordering on deification---looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion. Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant. You can see the same thing in politics. To a lesser degree with less public personalities---writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there's a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies...) and other creative types---but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives. I've never had this happen to me. I'm not sure if I'm grateful or resentful---having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don't know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing. But it's appealing the same way porn is---something most people, if they're at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over. I know I would not find it very attractive now. When I was twenty-five? You betcha. Bring 'em on. But if I'd had that then I think I'm fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly. I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person---emphasis on Person---and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after. (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can't provide.) But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art. The two are inextricably linked. Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating. The notion that the talent "arrives" and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it's not one I'm particularly in sympathy with---it all happens in my brain, it's definitely mine---but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true. Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work. There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it's done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being. To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising. For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that. But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner. A prisoner of other people's expectations. Those expectations always play a part in anyone's life, but certain aspects---the most artificial ones---get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration. Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female. No, he doesn't stop being Bono, but it's almost as if he says "Oh, it's time to do this sort of thing now" as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk. Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she's feeling right then is her's and to claim it is artificial is wrong. Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she's In The Moment, the emotions are real. If he'd ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan's part. [more . . . ]

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When We Were Ten

My sister Pat was the first, followed by her Irish Twin Eileen. Irish Twins are when you have two kids in one calendar year. Patricia Marie Hogan was born January 1, 1949 and Eileen Ann Hogan was born November 23, 1949. Dan (Daniel n/m/n) Hogan was born in 1952, and Susan Ann Hogan two years after that. Timothy Eves Hogan was born December 6, 1955. I began growing up at the same time America began growing up. The very week of my birth, in Alabama, Ms. Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. I believe this action set a pattern for my life. If I think I am right, you will not move me. You may remove me but, unless you persuade me otherwise, you are stuck with me as I am. Some say this contributed to my being married for the first time at age 41 but, I say it took me that long to find the right woman. My sister Mary Lee Hogan was born the next year, and for one day Susan, I and Mary Lee are three in a row for our ages. My brother Thomas Joseph Hogan was born in the 60’s and followed by a sister Julie Ann Hogan, another brother Terrence Gerard Hogan, and finally our baby sister Tracy Ann Hogan. All told, there were 10 siblings, my mom and dad and one or two dogs and anywhere from two to 14 cats in our house at any given time. We grew up worshiping the Holy Trinity; being Irish, Catholic and Democrats. We lived in an area of St. Louis County known as Richmond Heights, Missouri which according to legend was named such by a young US Army Lieutenant Robert E. Lee because the area reminded him of Richmond, Virginia. I don’t know about that but, the area was home to our family. Our Parish, St. Luke the Evangelist, took in parts of Richmond Heights, Maplewood, Clayton and parts of an area in the City of St. Louis known as Dogtown. Our family was no where near the largest in the Parish as there were many families with 11 or more kids, topped by the Powers family with 15.

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On the need to pay for content

There has been a lot of talk lately about coming up withe new models of providing information, such that the consumers will "continue" to pay for content. Not so fast, says Paul Graham:

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it. In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more? . . . Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper.

But don't people pay for information? Only certain kinds of information:

People will pay for information they think they can make money from. That's why they paid for those stock tip newsletters, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. But will people pay for information otherwise? History offers little encouragement.

[via Daily Dish]

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John Adams and Modern Perceptions

We just watched the last episode of John Adams. I got the DVD from the library and we went through it in one week, all seven installments. I have to admit, the last episode brought tears. The partnership between John and Abigail was well-portrayed and deeply moving. The older I get, the more I find the strongest story resonance with depictions of deep, deep friendships, especially those that exist between lovers, spouses, life partners. I cannot imagine losing Donna, who has become exactly that for me, in spite of the fact that I have friends of longer acquaintance, good friends, too. The casting was incredible, the make-up superb, the writing first class. What struck me most about this as well was the marvelously-nuanced dramatization of the fundamental differences in political philosophy between Adams and Jefferson. I can't help but think that when Adams declared that "the true history of our revolution is lost" he must have been thinking of the initial partnership and later dissolution of like-mindedness between himself and Thomas Jefferson, whom Joseph Ellis depicts an an American Sphinx. Adams is here portrayed as an idealist who cannot separate his philosophy from his pragmatism. In the first dozen years of the new republic, there was enormous public sentiment for France and when that country descended into the frenzy of its own revolution gone mad, that sentiment demanded that we support the revolutionaries. The irony that France supported us when it was still a monarchy and now those very people that had backed us (granted, as a move in their own war with England) were the victims of the mob ascendant was lost on most people, and apparently even Jefferson, who wanted us to embroil ourselves immediately and deeply in support of the revolutionaries. Washington---how lucky they were to have him---refused. He was a militaryman by training and he understood how to assess the chances of success and how to go about surviving a conflict in which you are outmatched. He had seen more than his share of defeat in a long career and knew well that ideology needed a strong hand to keep it in check, lest it carry you over the precipice. He refused to side with France, believing that neutrality was the only way for the United States to survive. Adams shared that belief.

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The Hierarchy of Disagreement

I found this illustration of how to order your arguments at the Starts With A Bang blog. This blog usually leads one to a first source. However, I had to do some digging to find the original creator of this image. This image is all over the web, but I think the first source is here, from the Create Debate blog in April 2008. This image (click on it to enlarge) was created to illustrate an earlier point by Paul Graham, whose text-only posts I've been (occasionally) reading for years. The premise is to always lead with your top level reasonable arguments, and never resort to the bottom layers. As Ethan Siegel (SWAB) put it,

It's sometimes tough to decipher what the central point of someone else's argument is, because most people don't argue clearly and logically. But if you can identify it, that's when you win. When someone else mucks around at the bottom of the pyramid, don't sink to their level; stay up high. Those top two levels are really the only way to ever change someone's mind, or to sway other intelligent, thinking people to your side.

This is an attitude that would serve us well on this site.

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